Thought I might finally do that “All Books Are Connected” post — the James Burke thing, what kind of serendipitous things I ran into this year that made stuff congeal in my head. Dunno if I can remember a whole lot of those though…but it might be a fun kind of linkblogging to do, sketch out some of the web of influences…

I have a friend in university — whenever I talk to her I try to drop an “all books are connected” into the conversation somewhere.

It’s how you do research when you’re at a complete loss!

Yet sometimes it just sounds like I’m saying “books are like hyperlinks” — not true at all, I suppose it’d be closer to say “there is no book that is not the cause of another book.” That doesn’t quite get to it either, though. “All books have hidden causes in other books”? You see, it’s difficult: it isn’t just the old James Burke thing, but I can only find the exact words to explain how it isn’t, about every other full moon.

“Any given book X has a chance of producing a more useful reading of any given book Y.”

Not quite.

“Reading any given book X will reveal a previously-undetectable causal connection between some books Y and Z read in the past, that necessitates the existence of some unknown book N.”

Getting closer. What it really is, is that reading any given book X will always reveal a previously-undetectable Pattern X of influence, that is inseperable from an already-known Pattern Y associated with some book Y already read…in the presence of some book Z.

Meaning: Book Z is out there somewhere, but there’s no way of knowing what it is until you read it.